Importing songs

Four importers. Every one of them lands on the same review screen before anything is saved, so you can skip, edit, or rename rows before commit.

Open Import from the side nav (or the welcome wizard's library step).

YouTube → ChordPro (one song)

Got a single song you want with a chord chart, and you know the YouTube reference? Use YouTube → ChordPro at the top of the import page.

Paste the URL. Loadout (via Claude with web-search) produces a stage-ready chord chart. If it can't find chords for that song online, it falls back to a lyrics-only chart with a note.

This is the most metadata-rich path for a single song — title, artist, lyrics, and a chart when one's available.

YouTube playlist (bulk)

Paste a YouTube playlist URL. Loadout pulls title and artist for each video (parsed from "Artist — Title" style video titles).

What does NOT get imported: lyrics, chord charts, key, BPM. Those land empty on each row.

To fill them in afterwards:

• Per song: open the song, hit Import via YouTube → ChordPro with the same video URL.
• Or edit the song directly.

This is the fastest way to populate a library at scale; YouTube → ChordPro is the fastest way to get a single song finished.

BandHelper

In BandHelper: Export Songs, download the file (tab-separated .txt or CSV).

In Loadout: From BandHelper or OnSong → upload the file. You'll see a column-mapping screen for any columns Loadout couldn't auto-detect. Map them, preview, commit.

What gets carried over:

• Title, artist, key, tempo, duration
• Lyrics (ChordPro-aware — if your BandHelper data had bracket chords, they survive)

OnSong

In Loadout: OnSong importer → upload one or more .onsong, .cho, or .chordpro files. Full ChordPro parsing — directives, chord-on-lyric bodies, section markers, the lot.

If you have a folder full of .cho files, you can drop the whole folder.

The review screen

Every importer ends at the same screen. Each row shows the parsed data; you can:

• Edit — fix a typo, add tags, set energy.
• Skip — exclude the row from commit (one-off, doesn't delete the source).
• Commit — save everything that's still checked.

Tip: Imports are not idempotent — if you import the same YouTube playlist twice, you get duplicate library rows. Loadout doesn't dedupe by title/artist automatically. Be intentional.

Section labels are normalized for you

External sources are inconsistent about how they label sections. YouTube → ChordPro often emits [Verse 1] / [Pre-Chorus] / [Chorus] instead of the proper {start_of_X} directives. BandHelper exports vary by author. Hand-typed charts use whatever the writer remembered.

Loadout normalizes all of these. The four section pills you'll see — VERSE, PRE-CHORUS, CHORUS, BRIDGE — cover a long tail of source variants. For example, [Guitar Solo], [Big Chorus], [Pre Chorus], [Verse 1], [Chorus (Modulated)] all classify cleanly without you doing anything.

See ChordPro basics → Section types for the full mapping table.

When you paste source containing the bracket-style labels into the song editor, a toast offers to rewrite them into canonical {start_of_X} directives. Click Convert and the stored chordpro is clean going forward.

What's next

• ChordPro basics — the format your imported charts will be in.
• Songs overview — what to do after the import lands.